Being In-between: Poetry for Children and Its Formal Method

Abstract

This introduction to the archive bloсk on poetry for children as a critical object attempts to place the development of poetic literature aimed for children within a larger context of literary debates that were taking place at the same time. Throughout the 1920s, such formalist scholars as Yuri Tynianov and Boris Eikhenbaum persistently emphasized in their work that literature should be seen (and judged) as an autonomous field of creative activity. A similar trend could be easily traced in the field of poetic literature for children, too. In this case, the claim to artistic sovereignty was realized as a desire to develop a distinctive set of literary tools, specific for children’s poetry. As many critics maintained at the time, poetry for children should be distinguished not by its themes, but by the ways it organizes the poetic material. New, purposefully created methods of structuring the word mass were perceived as the key feature which could distinguish poetry for children from the rest of the Soviet literature. As a result, by the middle of the 1930s, the Soviet poetry for children gradually developed its own characteristic features: this poetry was playful, lyrical, and humorous. Poems created by K. Chukovsky and S. Marshak delineated the lyric-and-ludic pole of Soviet poetry for children, while poems by V. Mayakovsky and A. Barto would become the classical examples of the “didactic” poetry, in which satire and scorns would function as pedagogical tools. Consequently, the [position of the poet for children would evolve, too: lonely outsiders (like Chukovsky) would be overshadowed by “revolutionary poets” (like Mayakovsky), systemic “fellow-travelers” (like Marshak) and “class-conscious” Soviet children’s writers (like Barto).

Keywords: methodological underdevelopment, content insularity, rhythmic-syntactic contour, acoustic approach to poetry, word play, lyrical poetry, new rhythmic, poetic evolution, Chukovshina